Sham Majid rates the players

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Today you can go download the beta of IE9 and from what I’ve seen it looks like it’s pretty damn impressive. We also released a version of Flash Player, codenamed “Square” which not only has support for IE9, but includes a bunch of code collaboration that we did with Microsoft to create a really streamlined experience. The Flash Player Team Blog has a bunch of info:

As part of our collaboration with Microsoft’s Internet Explorer team over the past few months, Flash Player “Square” has been enhanced to directly support the hardware-accelerated graphics capabilities in the newest version of IE. Flash Player “Square” leverages the new GPU support available with Internet Explorer 9 Beta to deliver a faster and more responsive user experience with Flash-based content. In our internal testing, we’ve seen significant improvements in Flash Player graphics performance – exceeding 35% in Internet Explorer 9 Beta compared to Flash Player running in previous versions of IE. While the performance improvements will vary based on the type of content and how it’s created, bitmap-heavy content for Flash Player will experience the greatest benefit. Flash-enabled content that’s embedded as transparent (wmode=”transparent”) will also run more efficiently given the benefits of offloading the HTML and Flash content compositing to the GPU. Try it out by downloading the Internet Explorer 9 Beta and the Flash Player “Square” preview. We’d appreciate your feedback and observations on performance.

So right off the bat with IE9 you get hardware support for Flash. We’ve also (finally) got native 64-bit binaries for Mac, Linux, and Windows. It’s been a long time coming, but we hope you get a chance to test these versions out and give us feedback.

We’re only a couple of months from MAX, and this gives you a taste of some of the things we’ve been working on. Between the work on HTML5 with Dreamweaver and Illustrator and the work the Flash Platform teams have been doing, it’s going to be an incredible year for RIAs and for Adobe designers/developers.

View full post on Digital Backcountry – Ryan Stewart’s Flash Platform Blog

When I did my video of various bits of Flash content running on the Nexus One, the overwhelming theme that kept coming up was battery life. I know battery life is something that both users and Flash developers are curious about. Flash provides access to a wealth of rich content. Video, games, and animation are all things that are much more processor intensive than rendering static images and text. In general, Flash content’s impact on battery life is comparable to other similar multimedia technologies. Where Flash really shines though, is that it uses the same amount of battery as other technologies, while providing a much richer experience with significantly better performance.

With all of the questions I wanted to provide some numbers about battery life but didn’t think that my rudimentary tests would be very good so I asked Vinay Ramani, the group product manager for mobile runtimes if his team had any data. These are very early initial tests but I thought they were worth sharing. You’ll be seeing more in-depth stress tests from us soon but hopefully these early numbers give you an idea of the fairly small impact that Flash Player in the browser has on battery life.

These are pretty close to clean-room tests. The team hooked up the meters and performed each test under a strict set of conditions:

• Wi-Fi – off
• 3G – on
• OTA Push – off
• Volume – on, at one notch
• Bluetooth – off
• Only browser is loaded, nothing else
• 3G, lying flat on a table

Also, keep in mind that this is ALL done in software. Hardware acceleration is coming down the road but we wanted to make sure that this thing ran lean and mean in software without hardware acceleration at first. We also have ways that developers can control how SWF content loads on their pages so they can give certain SWF files priority and the Flash Player will give those a higher percentage of the resources. This should result in a smoother browsing experience.

Video

Video is probably the thing I get asked the most about with respect to battery life and it’s a good thing to compare because since both Flash Player and the Nexus One’s native player support H.264 you can get a good feel for how the battery life stacks up between native H.264 and H.264 video played through the Flash Player. The team used the same YouTube video, one encoded at H.264 baseline level 2.1 at 30 fps with a resolution of 480 x 270. They did two sets of tests, one was on full brightness and the other was on half brightness. Then they just kept playing the video over and over again.

On full brightness, the Nexus One without Flash Player got 3 hours and 45 minutes. Playing the video through the Flash Player gave a battery life of 3 hours and 8 minutes. Not a big dropoff. At half brightness it was even better. The Nexus One without Flash got 3 hours 56 minutes and the Flash version got 3 hours and 31 minutes. Just an 10.5% change which isn’t bad at all considering everything the Flash Player does.

Gaming

As you can see from the Flash/non-Flash tests, video is pretty intensive no matter what. What was even better was the battery life around games. There wasn’t a good way to test non-Flash versus Flash, but the team took a couple of popular Flash games, Tic-Tac-Toe and Alchemist, and played them until the battery died.

Tic-Tac-Toe lasted 6 hours and 49 minutes while the device could play Alchemist on the Nexus One for 7 hours and 7 minutes. While they aren’t intense 3D games, that’s pretty spectacular battery life and this was on full screen brightness. If you’re a game developer you can be sure that people playing your Flash game are going to be able to play it for a loooong time.

Animation

Let’s also quickly talk about HTML5 and Flash Player on mobile devices both in terms of performance and battery life. The team used the exploding balls test from Cameron Adams and tested the Canvas versions and the Flash versions. This one is a little tricky because part of the impact on battery life is how many CPU cycles are being used. And the higher the frame rate, the more CPU content is going to use. So it’s tough to compare HTML5 and Flash content directly because right now HTML5 content just doesn’t run very well on devices. The canvas example runs at 6.7 frames per second while the Flash version runs at about 24 frames per second. The difference between those ends up being minimal even though Flash has so many more frames per second. With the canvas test you get about 3.1 hours of battery life and with Flash Player you get 2.9 hours of battery life. A difference of about 12 minutes. We’re going to be doing some more exact tests around this where we equalize frames per second, so you should see some dramatic improvements once the test can be normalized.

This is just a sample of some of the early numbers that we’re getting. As I said, we’ll have some more detailed tests soon, but this should show that the hit for running richer content isn’t as big as one would think. The teams have done an absolutely phenomenal job of creating a runtime that performs on par with the desktop player and doesn’t sacrifice much at all in the way of battery life. If you’re a Flash developer, the exact same things that got you excited about Flash Player on the desktop now apply to mobile devices. The mobile world is your oyster Flashers.

Now Flash on.

View full post on Digital Backcountry – Ryan Stewart’s Flash Platform Blog

TechCruch just posted about the news that Adobe and Google are going to be collaborating a bit around Chrome and the Flash Player. The basic gist is that Chrome will start integrating the Flash Player directly into the browser so that users will always have the most up to date versions and anyone who downloads Chrome won’t need to also install the Flash Player. I think that’s good, but the much bigger news in my opinion, is that we’re working with Chrome and Mozilla to revamp the plugin architecture. This has huge implications.

We’ve been using an old-school plugin model for a long time. In fact NPAPI, the plugin interface, stands for Netscape Plugin Application Programming Interface. And as the Wikipedia entry states, it’s so sucessful because it’s so simple. The API basically lets plugins associate themselves with a content type (like a SWF file) and then puts that plugin in charge of all the rendering. There’s not a lot of integration between the plugin and the content in the browser which means the plugin lives in its own little world and it’s tough to break out. You can do things like ExternalInterface but it’s still pretty hacky.

But under this new plug-in, we’ll have much closer integration at the browser level. There’s a great summary of what this means at the Chromium blog:

Improving the traditional browser plug-in model will make it possible for plug-ins to be just as fast, stable, and secure as the browser’s HTML and JavaScript engines. Over time this will enable HTML, Flash, and other plug-ins to be used together more seamlessly in rendering and scripting.

Think better access to the hardware APIs via this new plug-in model, better access to the DOM, and a generally much better, more stable experience. The Flash Player in the browser has always felt a little like a black box largely because ofthe constraints in the plugin model. Certain things didn’t work quite as you’d expect in a regular HTML site. Hopefully this changes that. In theory this could make it possible to use the save-password feature with your Flex/Flash apps, or make Flash SEO a lot easier, and it allows us to innovate around HTML-Flash integration. If you’ve used AIR, you’ve seen what’s possible when you have complete control over both technologies. This new plugin work makes that easier to do across all browsers that support it. I don’t know when/if we’ll see it, but it’s easier now.

Another benefit is that the API is going to be OS and Browser neutral so you won’t see such wildly different performance on different platforms. The hooks that we can use to make the browsing experience better will work across all of the browsers that support the new plugin across all of the operating systems.

View full post on Digital Backcountry – Ryan Stewart’s Flash Platform Blog

Last week I did a very quick, Flip Cam-quality video of Flash Player 10.1 running the March Madness on Demand site on a Nexus One. There is some stuttering when I switch from portrait to landscape, but other than that, it plays pretty well. It’s hard to capture with the Flip, but I was pleasantly surprised at how well it worked.

Also, Harish, one of the Adobe Evangelists in India, ported an AIR application he built to a browser app with Flex 4 and shows it running on the Nexus One. It’s pretty slick to see how well a Flex 4 app works on that little device.

View full post on Digital Backcountry – Ryan Stewart’s Flash Platform Blog